Caged Heat

Considered the quintessential "girls in prison" flick of the 1970s, novice director Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat is set in a hellish American woman's penitentiary run by vicious, wheelchair-bound Barbara Steele. Statuesque convict Erica Gavin is forced to undergo horrible (but legal) tortures when ...more

The award-winning director of Silence of the Lambs began his career, as have many of today's hottest filmmakers, working for Roger Corman's New World Pictures. This film, produced by Demme's wife Evelyn Purcell, is one of the best of the tacky women's prison subgenre. Erica Gavin is sent up the river on a trumped-up charge, only to go through the usual degradations at the hands of her fellow prisoners and wheelchair-bound warden McQueen (cult queen Barbara Steele). Steele has a bizarre ...more